About Steve Keen

I am Professor of Economics and Head of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University London, and a long time critic of conventional economic thought. As well as attacking mainstream thought in Debunking Economics, I am also developing an alternative dynamic approach to economic modelling. The key issue I am tackling here is the prospect for a debt-deflation on the back of the enormous private debts accumulated globally, and our very low rate of inflation.

I have recent­ly estab­lished a Patre­on site https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen, where peo­ple can sup­port my research and advo­ca­cy work with dona­tions start­ing at $1/month. That is now where I will engage in con­ver­sa­tion in response to posts. So if any­one here wants to con­tin­ue a dia­logue with me and oth­ers, please sign up there.

This site was flood­ed by a large num­ber of spam users at the same time as I became unable to main­tain my own role in dis­cus­sions here, since I am just too damn busy in Lon­don. This has caused the site to be sus­pend­ed three times by its ISP for per­for­mance issues. One more time and the account will be banned. I have there­fore decid­ed to delete all users on this site, bar those who have made posts (which is a hand­ful of indi­vid­u­als of course).

I’m tak­ing part in a debate on one of the major top­ics in this year’s elec­tion, Brex­it, on May 31st at 7.30pm at Can­ham, 40 Sheen Lane, Lon­don SW148LW. The oth­er speak­ers are Frances Cop­po­la, and Angus Arm­strong.

Frances Cop­po­la is an eco­nom­ic com­men­ta­tor in print and fre­quent­ly on the BBC.

Angus Arm­strong is direc­tor of macro-eco­nom­ics at one of the top research insti­tu­tions, the Nation­al Insti­tute of Eco­nom­ic and Social Research found­ed in 1938.

In 2008, con­ven­tion­al eco­nom­ics led us blind­fold­ed into the great­est eco­nom­ic cri­sis since the Great Depres­sion. Almost a decade lat­er, with the glob­al econ­o­my wal­low­ing in low growth that they can’t explain, main­stream econ­o­mists are reluc­tant­ly com­ing to realise that their mod­els are use­less for under­stand­ing the real world.

As I explain in this video, gov­ern­ment attempts to turn Uni­ver­si­ty entrance into a mar­ket­place have had the unin­tend­ed side-effect of under­min­ing plu­ral­ist eco­nom­ics. The UK gov­ern­ment has removed con­trols on the num­ber of places that Uni­ver­si­ties can offer in first year cours­es, and as a result there has been an increase in human­i­ties places offered by high­ly ranked Uni­ver­si­ties. Final year high school stu­dents have flocked to these Uni­ver­si­ties, and enrol­ments at low­er-ranked Uni­ver­si­ties have fall­en sub­stan­tial­ly.

A new organ­i­sa­tion called NEKS (for “New Eco­nom­ic Knowl­edge Ser­vices”, see www.neks.ltd) is hold­ing its inau­gur­al con­fer­ence on the eco­nom­ics of infra­struc­ture In West­min­ster on Tues­day Jan­u­ary 24th, and you should attend.

Why NEKS, and why Infra­struc­ture? The eco­nom­ic impor­tance of infra­struc­ture is obvi­ous, but the actu­al per­for­mance of infra­struc­ture often dif­fers rad­i­cal­ly from what is pre­dict­ed when it is being planned. Three forms of delu­sion make many infra­struc­ture projects far less ben­e­fi­cial than expect­ed by their pro­po­nents: the com­plex­i­ty of exe­cu­tion is under­es­ti­mat­ed, the ben­e­fits are over­es­ti­mat­ed, and ben­e­fits are also cal­cu­lat­ed poor­ly using dodgy eco­nom­ic the­o­ry.

This is a talk I gave in Ams­ter­dam to launch the Ams­ter­dam Rethink­ing Eco­nom­ics cri­tique of the cur­rent state of eco­nom­ics “edu­ca­tion” in the Nether­lands. The text of my slides is repro­duced below.

I’ve had some tough inter­views over the years (such as the BBC HARDtalk! inter­view ear­li­er this year with Stephen Sack­ur), but I’d have to cred­it the stu­dent inter­view­ers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ams­ter­dam’s Room for Dis­cus­sion event with giv­ing me the tough­est, well-informed grilling my ideas have had in pub­lic. I’m fol­low­ing up lat­er today with a keynote speech at the Dutch Rethink­ing Eco­nom­ics event tonight, and I’ll post that here lat­er this week.

Appar­ent­ly it’s the fifth anniver­sary of the day I gave this talk, to the Occu­py move­ment in Syd­ney, in Mar­tin Place, right out­side the offices of the Reserve Bank of Aus­tralia. The day after, the site was shut down by the police. It seems I was jinxed, because the same thing hap­pened in New York, the day after I sim­ply dropped off a cou­ple of copies of my book Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics. The speech holds up pret­ty well, though I’ve devel­oped my tech­ni­cal argu­ments a lot since then.

Video overview

Debunking Economics II

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